Thoughts on Asunción, Paraguay | Hacker News Reader

Thoughts on Asunción, Paraguay

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As a teenager, I backpacked around Latin America with some friends. Due to some issues in Bolivia, we ended up taking the long way to Brazil, through Paraguay.

The contrast was stark. We crossed the border and changed buses. Instead of a truck converted into a bus, with rain leaking through the roof, we had a decent Marcopolo with AC. Instead of a dirt road, there was pavement.

We arrived in Asunción late at night and grabbed a hotel not too far from the bus station. The woman at the front desk treated us like crap. So rude. We were exhausted and honestly didn’t care much, but man, I still remember that lady’s butt face. But then we handed over our burgundy passports.

Her face changed; from what seemed like barely contained rage to instant guilt. “I’m so, so, so sorry, I thought you were Argentinean. I didn’t know.” She showed us the rooms and even had someone help us with our bags.

Seems like the War of the Triple Alliance is still a source of hurt.

We didn’t stay long in Asunción; we took the bus to Iguazú the next morning. The little we saw, we liked. It seemed to be moving in a better direction than La Paz, Bolivia. And while still a bit underdeveloped, it felt like a nice, welcoming city. Unless, of course, you happened to be Argentinean.

A common stereotype in Paraguay is that Argentinians are rich assholes that look down on the Paraguayans, so not directly because of the war.

The stereotype is right, except for the "rich" part. And it's mostly applied to "porteños", the inhabitants of Buenos Aires. Natives from provinces can get a "pass" in short time.

I wonder, do people from Paraguay "get" the accent from the different provinces? I mean it is pretty easy for us Argentines to differentiate a porteño from a cordobes and even someone from the northern provinces (specially if they use slang) with a short conversation

Granted, whenever I had any sort of conversation with someone from Paraguay I had trouble to differentiate their language from someone from the Argentine northeast unless they started using some Guarani words (and that is still not that useful given it is also spoken in the Corrientes province)

Some accents are very distinct, such as the Cordobese one you mention. Others, not so much (e.g., people from Rosario), they come off as "Argentine" and that's it.

Paraguayan, living in Asunción. Interesting, yet a bit simplistic, take. Things in Paraguay are much more complex and nuanced than they seem at first sight.

Asunción downtown is "incoherent" as the OP said, but one of the factors is that most historic buildings in it are concentrated in the hands of a very few landlords. The buildings, since they are historic, cannot be demolished, and property taxes for downtown are quite high. So, the landlords leave them to rot, building new things after the buildings fall down due to neglect, taking advantage of the fait accompli.

That remark about "con factura or sin factura?" (invoice or no invoice) is not longer a thing. Most businesses now give you a legal invoice as a matter of course.

Anyway, nice to see my hometown featured on HN.

Westerners and gringos especially, have a special ability to turn up to a place that’s different from where they came and point out all of the failings in their eyes. Neglecting that the reasons they hate their own country might be coupled to those differences.

Certain distance helps with observation. If you are used to X from your childhood, it may not strike you that X is counterproductive.

This would work equally well for a Paraguayan coming to the West.

BTW the city where I live (Ostrava) is architecturally weirdly mixed as well, at least in the older parts, where Communist blocks of flats were often built into a bomb-related gap in an older street built in a very different (and usually more human-friendly) style.

This is a good example:

https://mapy.com/s/covogafahu

How I dislike that green tower...

Hating your own country isn't the only reason to travel!

There is a rather splendid travel book about the strange country that is Paraguay called 'At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels through Paraguay'. Part history, part travelogue. All weird. Probably only available second hand. I've never been there. Having read the above book, I'm not sure I want to.

IIRC Paraguay's economy is based in some part on smuggling stuff into other countries, duty free. Whisky in particular.

The long term dictator, Stroessner, is credibly accused of having abducted and raped vast numbers of underage girls. https://www.americasquarterly.org/fulltextarticle/how-paragu...

There's a Behind The Bastards two parter on Stroessner: very much worth listening to. They cover the underage girls issue, for which I'd say the accusations are more than credible, but he was an absolute scumbag for plenty of other reasons as well, including his Nazi associations. Paraguay provided a key hub and waypoint for Nazis escaping Europe in the aftermath of WWII.

I like 'Behind The Bastards' podcast (if 'like' is the right word for a podcast about awful people) and have listened to quite a few, including the Stroessner episodes. But some of the guests on the podcast seems a bit clueless and don't add much IMO.

A couple of reasons why Paraguay is a great place for remote workers:

* Friendly people * Great food (soups like Vori Vori, delicious BBQ) * Decent internet * Cheap rent * Low taxes (no taxes on foreign income) * Timezone alignment with the US * Economic stability

I’ve been here over 10 years and as long as you learn to not rely too much on public services, you’ll be fine.

Paraguay has a long history of stupid wars. They started the Chaco War with Bolivia over control of the Chaco region, which they thought was full of oil. Turns out it wasn't and it it's mostly uninhabited forests with some Mennonites now.

There's rich mineral/gas deposits. Also the part that we lost to Bolivia does contain oil. Also with fracking probably there is oil to be found, but not worth the investment, yet. Don't spread misinformation please. Half of The Chaco was already occupied by Bolivia when the war started. It wasn't Paraguay just starting the war. Same for triple alianza, England had a lot of interest in keeping Paraguay from becoming industrialized.

>England had a lot of interest in keeping Paraguay from becoming industrialized.

I don't remember reading about that. Please explain.

So rich that paraguay imports all of its oil and gas.

Are oil and gas completely fungible and equally processable? I know the USA both exports and imports oil (and has lots of processing) and my impression was there is a lot of nuance in the raw ingredients, their processing, and the logistics of each step of the way.

That was a limits problem to which several negotiated outcomes were tried, none of them successful. Then Bolivians tried a policy of encroaching military forts in the Chaco region. It was a matter of time before a Bolivian patrol would clash with a Paraguayan patrol. That's how happened. I wouldn't say it was stupid more than any other border wars are stupid.

Maybe it helps to read about the history of Asunción first: https://asunciontimes.com/culture/paraguayan-history/history...

The river? Contaminated since they don't have sewer system. The best place to go according to locals? The mall. Want to go anywhere else in Paraguay? It'll take you ages due to a lack of infrastructure.

It’s interesting how malls have mostly died in America but are still a huge thing in many countries, especially ones that have become more developed in the last couple of decades.

Really? This sounds very interesting, as the USA is the place that i would expect to have the most malls.

Amazon then COVID wrecked them.

COVID might have finally done some stragglers in, but large scale indoors malls in the US were pretty well wrecked long before that

Malls are looked back on nostalgically as a 90s/2000s thing by a big percentage of the population. The whole mallwave genre is one example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mallsoft

There are still many huge malls, but generally speaking the vast majority of them have closed, are empty, or are being rebranded into something else.

The comment you're replying to still holds.

> the USA is the place that i would expect to have the most malls

It's just that a lot of the malls have been augmented or replaced by strip malls. They have the same kinds of stores and they are still close enough to each other that it's convenient. Many have security, though it's more for the property than it is for the employees or guests, and there are large ones all over the place. You can go to Target and get a $14 can opener that you were hoping to pay $5 for but they made sure not to carry any cheap can openers, and notice there's a cell phone store nearby and go and get locked into a contract where you pay more than double. Don't forget to get some boring, expensive, and unhealthy food on the way out.

Strip malls aren’t the same thing and don’t have the nostalgic factor. They also don’t have the sense of place that malls did in their heyday – who goes to hang out at a strip mall, for example?

>This sounds very interesting, as the USA is the place that i would expect to have the most malls.

Since online shopping took over, why would Americans travel long distances by car to go to the mall?

Some things are still a lot easier to buy in-person, like books and clothes. Online stores rarely have enough information about the product, either as a whole (materials, specs, etc) or as an instance (wear and tear, etc).

With the rise of expendable income in developing countries, malls fill a need to buy items to improve their standard of living. I'd argue developed countries have already improved their quality of life enough that malls aren't needed as much.

malls have: - security - parking - AC It's the perfect place for going out in a developing country.

I recently went back to my local mall (in the US) for the first time in a long time that was a ghost town until recently and it was packed full of kids and families! Arcades, carnival style games in storefronts, ice cream stores, go karts, they even had one of those Japanese style capsule stores. It seems has become less explicitly shopping place and more a place to kill a few hours with the family. Would be interested if this is a trend in other places.

I was recently in a mall for the first time in years and was shocked by how full and vibrant it was.

That being said, the two malls I used to haunt in my home city where I grew up are either shut down or conspicuously empty of both foot traffic and shops.

I guess it's because of the shrinking middle class. Fewer Americans live in middle-income households, and their share of total consumer spending has gone down even more. Businesses specialize by being cheap or targeting the wealthy. Nice and affordable is no longer as viable strategy as it used to be.

They have (or had) bus services somewhat similar to Greyhound in the US. A friend and I took a trip to the Iguacu falls from Asuncion (more than 20 years ago, granted), which was an overnight bus trip with a brief stop in Ciudad del Este. It was reasonably comfortable as these things go. In a car it would be quicker but still probably 5 - 6 hours even though it's not much more than 200 miles because, as you've pointed out, the roads aren't amazing.

The railway had closed down only a few years before I visited but, at that time, there was little hope of it reopening. I've no idea what's happened since.

As a "local", I wouldn't ever recommend a mall for going. Maybe a good bar, there are some here.

> Indeed, 70% of the new housing supply is acquired by foreign investors as a capital preservation strategy.

Housing being used as an investment vehicle is pretty much a global problem and one of the most pernicious consequences of modern capitalism. Be it Argentina->Paraguay or Russia->London or Germany->Spain.

Real estate has been an investment vehicle used for capital preservation for millennia.

Not quite. Owning land / land rights for productive uses has been the pre-eminent form of capital ownership in history up to the modern age. But this is building or buying solely as a vehicle for speculation, i.e. with only market value in mind. That is a capitalist "innovation".

In some ways, it is just more noticeable now. Because even countries like the US had a huge push for public infrastructure in the road network, state schools and energy when those things were both more and less important than now. Now urban housing, broad education and energy efficiency have become more important with changes in society and the economy. But there isn't the same public influence in those areas now.

That is, there were always estates, land, and business. And private education. Just that public investment created and enabled other opportunities. A massive road network enabled sprawl where additional housing could be constructed at a decent cost. Now the economy wants density for network effects, but there isn't a similar expansion in public transport. So urban housing has become very valuable.

There is an increasingly interest among Brazilians (specially libertarians) to change its citizenship to Paraguay, most due its fiscal policies that are the complete opposite from Brazil. Apart from rich regions like Southeast and South, Paraguay is like any other place in Brazil.

I'm compelled to live there as well, but the factor of living far from anything interesting is quite important in my book, but definitely is better than Brazil (which for me doesn't have any future). I would prefer to move to richer countries but it's been harder and harder these days

>>Apart from rich regions like Southeast and South, Paraguay is like any other place in Brazil.

That would be a problem, no offense. I get the sentiments, but Brazil is not a basket case by any measure. I'm in upstate São Paulo and have traveled to Paraguay many times, and have Guarany speaking [brazilian] friends with properties there. The ruling elite there is authoritarian in a way that is hard to convey. You just got to see for yourself.

Anyways, it's not a place for inquisitive and authority averse minds.

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